Talk:Register (sociolinguistics)

Isn't there another meaning of "register" in linguistics, having to do with tone languages? --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 09:15, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Yes you are right. Tone languages are sometimes divided into "register" tone languages, (the pitch is steady) and "contour" tone languages (fluctuating pitch). The term 'register language' is also used to indicate a language where vowel phonation is combined with tone in a single phonological system. Burmese and Cambodian, for example, are register languages.

So I propose moving this page to Register (language variety) and making Register (linguistics) into a disambiguation page — or even seperating Register (language style) from register as variety. Unfortunately, that means going through the "what links here" and changing a bunch of links. Any takers? ntennis 00:47, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

G.B. Shaw quotation

I found this sentence in a Hungarian source (my own translation into English):

G.B. Shaw once said that he spoke “English” in three different languages: he uses one for writing his plays, he uses the other when arranging official functions of life, and he uses the third with his intimate friends; these three languages are quite dissimilar to each other.

Could you possibly help me find the original English quotation by Shaw himself? (Maybe it's related to the topic of this article.)

Adam78 14:38, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Discuss fully the Concept of Field in Registers —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.78.59.66 (talk) 16:26, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Question

Hello. Does someone know much about the cross-linguistic variation of register usage? I'm a native Hebrew speaker, and I have noticed that "contractions" seem to be associated with more formal registers than "full" forms, which is strikingly contradictory with English usage- though this might have to do with these "contractions" preserving synthetic aspects of Biblical Hebrew which are being lost in Modern Standard Hebrew, which is increasingly analytic. (As an example, "anu" is the formal variant of "anakhnu", the first person plural pronoun) This is all mere anecdote, unfit for encyclopedic formats. I was mostly wondering if others thought this might be a good research thread to expand the article, in which case I will try to find some scholarly works on the subject. JonathanHopeThisIsUnique (talk) 21:24, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Code switching

This topic is intimately connected to code switching, but doesn't refer to that article or topic, and as such gives undue weight to a particular type of register use.

Article currently reads As with other types of language variation, there tends to be a spectrum of registers rather than a discrete set of obviously distinct varieties—numerous registers can be identified, with no clear boundaries between them. That's true but misleading and again undue weight (and unsourced). When code switching is involved, either by a single user or by a community, the registers tend to be quite distinct. Andrewa (talk) 20:42, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

Hello, Andrewa. I agree with you that, like many Wikipedia articles, this one is incomplete. Topics such as code switching, style (sociolinguistics), dialect, and others are relevant to & perhaps overlapping register. (I think that those Wikipedia articles are currently linked from this one, but some only in the 'See also' section.) That said, I don't think I've ever seen a charge of 'undue weight' used in this way. Such charges usually are leveled at articles that give more attention to one theory or point of view than to other competing views, or that elevate a fringe theory alongside widely accepted views on the topic. In any case, expansion of the article is warranted and most welcome.

By the way, the specific sentence you quote is in the lead section, which may explain why you didn't see a source cited for it. (Per MOS:CITELEAD, "Because the lead will usually repeat information that is in the body, editors should balance the desire to avoid redundant citations in the lead with the desire to aid readers in locating sources for challengeable material.") If you think the assertion is controversial or likely to be challenged, then by all means cite a source if you know of one, or add a {{citation needed}} tag. Cnilep (talk) 02:29, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Citations

Added citation flag because all the in-line citations are in APA style, not in Wiki style.

I may come back and try to fix them at some point but have a few things higher on my queue. Elizabeth.f.chamberlain (talk) 05:42, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

There is no single "Wiki style" for citations; see WP:CITEVAR. Either parenthetical citations (as used in this article) or footnotes are acceptable, as long as an article is internally consistent. That said, I do not personally object if User:Elizabeth.f.chamberlain or others want to change this article. It might be best to ensure there is consensus for such a move, though. Cnilep (talk) 06:19, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up; I clearly ought to read deeper in the style manual than I have. Came in with the thought of responding to the [who?] flag in the lead but realized all the rest of the citations weren't what I expected. I'll remove the citation flag and respond to [who?] with consistent citations without changing the whole thing. Elizabeth.f.chamberlain (talk) 19:07, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Register vs Style

The page on Style says 'register' and 'style' are sometimes considered interchangeable. This page literally uses the word 'style' to refer to registers. I propose that either: - these pages should be merged; or - the language should be cleaned up so as to retain their distinctness. In the second case, it would be beneficial to explain the difference between them on one or both pages. I have no idea what the difference might be; in my education, we referred only to register. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Apollo reactor (talk • contribs) 17:11, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

Requested move 4 August 2024

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. No consensus to move this article was established. (closed by non-admin page mover) Reading Beans 12:01, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

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Register (sociolinguistics) → Socio-linguistic register – Parenthetical disambiguation, as used today, is kind of a last resort.

Sociolinguistic is a bit squished for new readers, so I prefer a hyphen for first use, including in the title and lead sentence. I want the title to be easily parsed by readers who have not heard the term "Sociolinguistic" before, or even the prefix "Socio-".

Simply Linguistic does not disambiguate enough: see Register (disambiguation)#Linguistics.

Register as a base name does not meet my understanding of WP:COMMONNAME; I understand it as requiring the low-context variant (i.e. not the term used in the middle sections of papers in the field). As long as the full term is used in the titles of some papers in the field, I believe the full term should be considered to meet WP:COMMONNAME. And, well... this full name is used in the bodies of some papers, at least. And "linguistic register" is used in plenty of paper titles, but we've ruled that out for other reasons.

My understanding of WP:COMMONNAME seems to be borne out by success in move discussions I started: from "Inflation (cosmology)" to "Cosmic inflation"; from "Transformation (genetics)" to "Genetic transformation". But I think it's time for me to start a discussion on the MOS talk page itself about this "low context vs high context" thing, since it may exist only in my mind at the moment, or as a non-obvious implication of other core CRITERIA for article titles.

All that said, I believe Socio-linguistic register is the best title for this article. The hyphen or entire prefix can and should be dropped for most subsequent uses within the article. Jruderman (talk) 04:48, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose – low-context COMMONNAMES without alternative common-enough variants are basically the most likely use case for parenthetical disambiguation, in my mind—e.g. Seal (emblem) versus Seal (mechanical)—luckily, we have Pinniped that makes sense to use for another seal, so we pick that there. Though Emblematic seal and Mechanical seal would be coherent for those pages, they aren't themselves used enough to justify the articles being called that. It may be parse-able, but it's not recognizable.

As for the hyphen, I find this more simple to oppose: the article for the discipline is Sociolinguistics, and the hyphenated form is used not at all, so this really does create more confusion than it resolves, in addition to being a typographical novelty to resolve a problem we normally resolve in prose if we have to, which I don't think we have a sufficient case for.

Remsense🦭 05:06, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

I don't feel too strongly about the hyphen, except to the extent that it would hurt my ego to "lose" a hyphen discussion twice in a row (the first on Talk:Gender nonconformity). — Jruderman (talk) 05:12, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

If it would help, I can immediately go out there and find another hyphen discussion to pick the wrong side in so that we're even. Remsense⌿ 05:14, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

lol no need to WP:POINT today — Jruderman (talk) 05:17, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Just wanted to say this made me smile. :) Botterweg14 (talk) 02:50, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Regarding consistency with Sociolinguistics... maybe. If someone lands on this article first, from e.g. an article about formality in general, having a hyphen may be helpful. (I hope it's not cheating that I just added a link from that article's see also section.) Jruderman (talk) 05:17, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose per Remsense. The standard term is really just "register". Even as a non-socio-linguist, I would never add the qualifier. Botterweg14 (talk) 02:50, 6 August 2024 (UTC)
• Oppose addition of hyphen. Graham (talk) 04:10, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Lead-up to move discussion

Previously this was above with the heading "Terminology changes"

@Jruderman‎, I've contested your move for now so we can have the discussion first. Remsense诉 04:18, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Alright. I didn't expect a parenthetical dab to WP:NATDAB move to be controversial, but I'll start the move discussion shortly. Jruderman (talk) 04:19, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Understandable! The issue to me is that sociolinguistic register, while coherent, is not itself a common form used for the term. It is much more commonly simply called a register. Searching my book library, the exact string sociolinguistic register appears somewhere in a book 3 times (with a hyphen returned nothing), whereas the two strings sociolinguistics and register appear nearby one another somewhere in 25 books. Remsense诉 04:24, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Do you also contest my changes to the lead sentence? (See net changes of 2 diffs.) I think my changes are an improvement even if the article isn't re-titled, but it seems you chose to revert them. I suppose the changes could give my preferred title an unfair advantage, creating a kind of COI for me. Jruderman (talk) 04:26, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

So, I don't think socio-linguistics is a common form for the field. I think I get what you mean when you're trying to make the division between the two morphemes more clear on first appearance, but that's simply not something we do for lead sentences? It's reminiscent of bolding the referents in the expansion of an acronym or initialism—e.g. MDN (Mozilla Developer Network)—which is explicitly proscribed in the MOS. Generally, we should avoid stylistic novelties to explain prose, and simply explain it sufficiently in prose, is my understanding. Remsense诉 04:36, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Adding a hyphen is a small deviation, and the reach of COMMONNAME into punctuation is limited (see MOS:CONFORM and MOS:HYPHEN). Btw did you choose that example because I once worked at Mozilla? Also btw it's okay for you to refactor any of this discussion up here into the move discussion below, and I'll assume you're okay with that too unless I read an objection from you within 24h. Jruderman (talk) 04:58, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Fwiw I created Register (formality) as a redirect. I don't think it's an especially good title but I think it's a decent redirect. Jruderman (talk) 05:05, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.